Crying at Grey’s
I was young when I first cried at a television show. It was Highway to Heaven, and my mom had to carry me out of the room. I was so confused by my uncontrollable tears, aware that what was happening on screen was not real, but that my emotional reaction was.
I have memories of being a crier in general, at least early on. In high school, I fretted when I noticed I didn’t cry much anymore, worried that it signaled a snapping of connection to everyone and everything. Since then — notwithstanding a first, fraught, long-distance relationship in college — I’ve settled into a somewhat more stoic persona. I well up occasionally, and I have ridden all the emotions of pregnancies, breastfeeding, and motherhood. Still, my most frequently felt feelings are frustration, anxiety, anger, and my expressions of these are predictable — nervous pacing, lack of sleep, and (yikes) yelling and slamming. I don’t lock myself in bathrooms or closets for a good cry; tears just aren’t how feelings work their way through me.
Except while watching Grey’s Anatomy. All those invitations into other people’s pain and complexity — every episode is a tear-jerker, complete with shudders and shakes. I often crawl into bed after bingeing a few episodes with emotion still lumped in my throat, my body still tense from forestalling and then releasing the floodgates.
From the start, Grey’s played right into my Millennial-cusp hands. A balanced diet of Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, West Wing, and E.R. had sustained me through high school and college with just the right blend of prime time scandal meeting ambitious, consuming careers. When Grey’s premiered, my New York City roommate and I restructured our usual “Sunday Fundays” to ensure we could catch each week’s episode. We would leave our corner dive bar early, even for the episode that aired after the Super Bowl. We made sure our takeout arrived before ABC’s lead-in. Visiting friends knew that quiet, rapt viewership would be on the agenda if they stayed through Sunday evening.
We saw almost nothing of ourselves in Meredith Grey or her overworked and over dramatic colleagues. I had given up my own (admittedly partially E.R.-fueled) dreams of being a neurosurgeon years ago (around the time I took college chemistry). Our careers were built more around open cubicle plans and mid-town happy hours than the cohort, round-the-clock experience of surgical residents. We were caught in no sultry love triangles, had healthy and happy — or at least only mildly complicated — relationships with our families.
But during that first season or two, our commitment to the show was deep. It was a thing we shared even when our roommate situation got a little bumpy, an appointment we had even when my roommate’s new boyfriend was around most of the rest of the time. In graduate school I moved out of New York and on from the show. It could have been living alone, loads of heady reading that couldn’t be so easily diverted for a soapy medical drama, or just a deep eye-roll at the repetitive cycle of drama the show seemed caught in.
And then, just before the dawn of our current “Golden Age of Television”, I had a baby boy. As I struggled through post-partum nursing, a doula recommended using each afternoon “witching hour” to set myself up in an unladylike sprawl on my sofa, with lots of snacks and water so handy I didn’t have to even tilt my torso. “Just sit and watch some TV. Let him sleep and snack as he needs to.”
Around the same time a friend’s post on Facebook expressed horror at what had happened on that night’s Grey’s Anatomy episode. “People still watch that show?” I thought. The next afternoon I set up on my sofa as instructed and discovered Grey’s episodes in a syndicated slot on Lifetime. About halfway into an episode for which I had only minimal context, I realized that I was still very much going to watch that show.
Almost ten years later, I am current. The realities of family — not to mention the fire hydrant of high quality content now available — mean that I don’t watch every week. But after a couple of weeks I start aching for my husband to have a night out so that I can empty the DVR. Pre-COVID, he would come home late to find me still engrossed in the goings-on of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. He would walk down to my basement hideout and start to ask how things went, until I waved him off with a loud “SHHH!”
I never watched daytime soap operas, but have seen many of the evening ones. I see how Grey’s exists in the vein of the 90210s and such, rather than the rosters of high-brow, critically acclaimed series these days. But the irresistibility of other prime time soaps came from plot extremes — drug addictions and early cancer deaths, weddings called off and fathers killed by mobs. Such twists and turns occur in Grey’s along with even more outrageous clinical cases, but it is the show’s raw emotion, even sentimentality, that I find so addictive. I don’t auto play the next episode because I cannot wait for some plot piece to be resolved. I don’t care all that much whether so and so gets or stays together with so and so, and seventeen seasons in, no character’s death can catch me off guard. Instead, I keep going because that 48-minute emotional rollercoaster is thrilling; it ensnares me.
Every episode begs viewers to let down their guards and embrace the feeling of all the things. Watching the emotion — whether triumph and promise or pain and loss or a whole shebang combination — work across the faces of exhausted surgeons, patients, or family members gets me every time. We don’t just mourn a patient death on an operating room table, but also sit in the deep sense of defeat that death gives the surgeon. The team of Grey’s doctors routinely develop intense, preternatural connections with patients. Relationships formed in just a few pre-op meeting minutes compel doctors to coordinate patient proms, commit insurance fraud, or pursue new vocations and relationships of their own. All of this is set to just the right swell of singer-songwriter-y music that cues our compassion, reminds us to identify not with the patients or the doctors but with the relationships between them.
Much has been written about how doctors enter medical school — in any healthcare model — with more altruism and tenderness than they have upon leaving. I was at a virtual book club meeting recently with a psychologist who has been a leader in bringing mindfulness training to medical residents, and has studied its impact on physicians’ maintaining true care for and connection with others. She told a story about a resident in one of her first trainings. She asked the group to breathe deeply with their hands on their hearts, and a young woman exclaimed, with complete and utter shock “I actually feel my heartbeat!” My friend, who was a member of that early group of scholars, remembered the moment. They both noted how astonishing it was that professionals who spent whole days analyzing others’ vitals were so unaware of their own.
While we categorize the “caring professions” differently, we know the same progression toward disillusionment and detachment is true over the trajectories of so many careers, indeed, so many lives. The mundanity of the inside of so many of our relationships can have an equal effect. But Grey’s Anatomy wraps its viewers into the moments where renowned, award-winning surgeons catch their own heart flutter.
We both do and don’t expect this of the best people in medicine — we know that care-taking is part of it, but we also know there’s so much grueling training, so much deference to science and data, so much talk of lawsuits. The poignancy — even overdone-ness — of each and every Grey’s interaction is a triumph for humanity in both health care and beyond. In a year where we have celebrated “healthcare heroes” for soldier-like sacrifices and watched them beg for protective equipment on viral videos, the show marches on, both pivoting to reflect current brutal headlines, and carrying seamlessly on with characters we’ve gotten to know over almost two decades. The staff of Grey-Sloan Memorial — like nurses, doctors, and support staff in real life — didn’t become new people overnight to grapple with a global pandemic. This horror just offered another revelation of their disposition to mercy and service.
It’s maybe embarrassing in my particular social circle to still be so attached to this show that, when I admit to watching, I often call my “guilty pleasure.” So many (very excellent) shows today prize the hardened brow, the unreadable expression, the “That sucks, but we’ve got to carry on” so often required for persevering in real life. For me, though, watching and feeling-with superhuman but nevertheless flawed characters as they navigate the pain and suffering — or relief and satisfaction — feels so deliciously indulgent and cathartic. My own pulse races — “There it is! My heartbeat!” That seems worth a little embarrassment, a not-so-guilty-after-all pleasure.
